AMA with AMA: Answering (lots of) YOUR Questions!
Advice... my relationship with exercise... my name... winning the lottery... and what to do if you can't hike!
Pssst. As always, my posts are far too long for e-mail format, so click ‘read more’ at the bottom to see the whole thing!
Dear Kula Diaries,
Today I’m diving deep into the Kula Diaries Vault which is chock full of some amazing questions right now. I know that these AMAs are getting longer and longer… but I’m trying my best to answer all the questions… and we already know that I can’t stick to the fabled ‘ideal’ of a 1,000 word limit for posts anyways - ha!
If your question hasn’t been answered yet… have no fear! There are a lot of questions in there, and I try to include an interesting variety of them in each of these AMA columns. If you are new here… AMA means ‘Ask Me Anything’ … and AMA also happens to be my initials… hence, AMA with AMA! I am having a lot of fun answering these questions, and hopefully providing some unexpected laughs… stories… or insights into the things you are curious about.
Thank you all so much for being here! This is my 23rd week of writing The Kula Diaries and I feel really grateful that I get to share some words and ideas with all of you every single week!
Dear AMA,
What is your view on advice columns?
I had to start with this question, because… well… this will be the first time I ever give advice about advice in an advice column. Honestly, I just really wanted to write that sentence - ha!
But, seriously… I think advice columns are great… as long as you approach them with an open minded perspective and don’t read them as law. I love learning about different ideas and views on topics, and I’ve received so much insight and ‘food for thought’ that I otherwise would have never considered. That being said — I think that it is critical to consider the source when you are listening to advice. Look at the person who is giving the advice, and honestly ask yourself whether or not you feel that your own vision for your life is in alignment with how that person is living their life.
Ultimately, I think that advice can be a beautiful gift — but it should be approached with a sense of curiosity, rather than believing that everything being said is true or the ‘right way’ to do something. There are infinite ways to do anything on this planet, and we are all completely entitled to our own views — and that includes the decision to completely ignore advice columns all together. Personally, I really enjoy reading them because I am such a naturally curious person, and I am fascinated by all of the different ways to look at things in the world. When you hear advice or ask for advice, I think the most important thing that you can do is listen to it… and then decide what parts of it you want to keep (if any)… and what parts don’t feel exactly in alignment with who you are.
You are the best judge of what’s right for you. Asking for advice isn’t bad, but make sure that you aren’t doing something ‘just because’ somebody on the internet said you should. If you decide to do something… do it because you want to do it and because you feel in your heart that it is right for you.
I already mentioned that I was a huge Ann Landers fan when I was a kid… I devoured her columns in the newspaper, and just loved her curt, sage advice. As a business owner, I’ve often asked for advice from other entrepreneurs — which is really helpful. I’ve discovered that I have certain people within my circle of friends, family members and acquaintances that I trust to discuss certain topics… and not others. For instance, my dad was an exemplary role model for me as a leader during his career, so I have often asked him for professional advice about being a supervisor of employees, but I probably wouldn’t ask him to chime in on my meditation or dance practice. I’ve actually tried to get him to dance before… it didn’t go well - ha!
The final thing that I will say about advice… is that it can become overwhelming and it can make the process of decision making somewhat obscured and cloudy. If you are looking for advice on a particular situation, the best advice you will ever find is from the answers within your own heart. Focus on the energy of the solution, and then sit in quiet and simply listen. You’ll be surprised at the clarity that arrives when you tune out the noise (mine included) and ask yourself the same question that you thought you needed to ask others.
Dear AMA,
What is your relationship to exercise?
This is such a fun and loaded question to answer… and I’m guessing that you might have anticipated that when you asked the question… so here goes - ha!
I’ve already spoken a little bit about my struggle with disordered eating. Along with disordered eating, I would also say that I have had definite bouts of disordered exercise behavior — consisting mostly of either excessive exercise, obsessive ‘tracking’ of my exercise habits, or limiting food intake if I didn’t exercise. Ugh!
When I think back to my years of unhealthy exercise, the thing that stands out to me the most is that all of my supposedly ‘healthy habits’ were focused on fixing things that were ‘wrong’ with me - i.e. weight, shape of my butt, abs, etc…. Of course, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me at all. And while I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong or bad about wanting to change something in your life — I do now believe it must come from a sense of wholeness… exactly where you are.
Many years ago, my workout routine was more fixed and rigid — I spent time doing intense HIIT workouts and I belonged to a variety of gyms. I also spent my time on the weekends doing long, challenging hikes. I wore a step counter on my wrist and believed that I had to hit the arbitrary 10,000 step mark on my FitBit. This is also during the time when I was obsessively tracking my macros (protein, carbs, fat) on the My Fitness Pal app. When I started this program, I immediately lost a significant amount of weight (because I wasn’t eating nearly enough, obviously)… I was hungry all the time… and my period stopped completely. Seems healthy, right? Ha! The way that I was eating was completely unsustainable, and since I was literally starving, I began to develop strange hoarding behavior with my food… I’d mostly fast for the entire day and then eat a massive meal in the evening. Since I wasn’t eating when I was actually hungry, my metabolism basically shut down… and I gained all of the weight that I had lost back + added on an additional 10lbs of weight. The whole experience was, honestly, disgusting… unhealthy… and rooted in the horrible diet culture that tells us that we need to fix something about ourselves. If you have experienced the effects of this horrible diet culture … or if it is a current struggle in your life… I am really sorry. It’s an awful way to live.
I’ve previously described that I had finally ‘had enough’ of the food tracking… and I decided to give it up. Shortly after that, I found a book called Intuitive Eating, which completely changed my life. Along with Intuitive Eating, I also decided that I would start Intuitive Exercising. I didn’t have a program for that, but I decided that my standard would be this: If it feels fun and you enjoy it, do it. I immediately stopped going to the gym, and I asked myself: What do I actually enjoy doing for exercise? I love walking. So, I started walking. I also love push ups and lunges (oddly enough), so I started doing those. Now, I walk every single morning and do my sets of push ups and lunges and a few different ab exercises, because I really and genuinely enjoy them and how they make me feel. I caught myself tracking my steps on my cell phone about a year ago, and I quickly stopped — I realized that it was getting obsessive almost immediately. Now, I don’t track anything. I walk if it feels good… and there are also days when I feel tired, and don’t really feel like doing much… so I listen to that too. If I don’t walk as much, I don’t punish myself by depriving myself of food. In general, I just intuitively do what feels best — both exercise and food related and I finally feel like I am at a place where I just trust my body to do what it does.
Many of you know that I also have a daily dance practice. I’ve been dancing for over 1,040 consecutive days now (!), and that’s definitely been another fun part of my ‘exercise’ routine - although I feel like dancing is a bit more of a meditative practice for me than a workout. Dancing brings me a lot of joy and it has allowed me to connect to my body in a meaningful way and to explore movement that previously felt very awkward or uncomfortable to me.
I am in a place now where I feel really good about my relationship with exercise. I do it because I genuinely love moving and because I feel better when I’m active. I don’t ever have to ‘motivate’ or ‘force’ myself to do anything — it’s integrated as a part of my day, and I always really look forward to it. I’m fortunate enough that I live in a place where I can walk in the woods, and my morning walks don’t feel like a workout to me — they just feel like a really important part of my day. As somebody who has had a very unhealthy relationship with exercise, it feels really good to finally be in a place where I can accept how I am and enjoy adding movement to my day without thinking that I need to fix anything. I do still have my occasional moments of being overly self-critical… but I try to notice those for what they are: old thought patterns trying to resuscitate themselves. Luckily, I now know that I don’t have to listen.
Dear AMA,
How do you view your name? Do you think it fits you? (You previously mentioned going by another name in childhood or with your family)
I love my name! My mom told me that when she was a little girl, she wanted to name her first daughter (if she had one) Anastasia… and I was lucky enough to be the recipient of that name. Oddly enough, I was named Anastasia… but my entire family called me ‘Stacy’ for over 30 years of my life. If you look in a baby book, you will see that Anastasia has many nicknames… Anna, Ana, Tasia… and Stacy. So, I was Stacy for most of my life.
In 2012, I started working for BNSF Railway as a railroad police officer. I was given an e-mail address with my real name (Anastasia), and so people had a very hard time finding me in the e-mail directory, because everybody knew me as Stacy. I had to call a dispatch center frequently during my time as a railroad police officer, and one of the dispatchers asked me one day, “Anastasia is such a beautiful name… why don’t you use that?”. Honestly, I didn’t know. “Well, I guess because everybody just calls me Stacy”, I replied. I had recently gone through a divorce and was definitely in a transition phase in my life. Ironically enough, I had kept my married last name (since I didn’t want to explain the name change to anybody), even though I never really liked it. My maiden name was Ruland, but my married name was difficult to spell and pronounce. I still remember how traumatic it was to change it… the first few times that I said my new last name out loud, I felt like I had stuck a sock in my mouth. When I got married for the first time, nobody had warned me how shocking it would be to change my name. It really felt like I had lost a little piece of who I was… in a marriage that I didn’t really even understand. It almost felt like I had been swept away by the idea of marriage… and then the reality of it was… shocking.
When I met Aaron, I had told him that I’d likely never get married again. This was during the time when I was considering switching from ‘Stacy’ to ‘Anastasia’. Aaron loved the name Anastasia, and he started using it. The first few time that I introduced myself as Anastasia, it felt very weird. Who was this Anastasia person? But, very quickly, I realized how much I loved the name. Stacy had never really felt like me. Stacy had always reminded me of the bubbly babysitter from The Babysitter’s Club book series (apologies if you are also a Stacy - ha!), and it never felt like it fit me. Anastasia, on the other hand, felt a little bit mysterious… I loved it.
When most people hear the name Anastasia, or Ah-nah-stah-see-yuh (as they pronounce it in most countries outside of the US), they immediately associate it with Grand Duchess Anastasia who went missing after her entire family was murdered. They also associate it with the Disney Movie of the same name. In fact, the name Anastasia is actually a Greek name, not Russian (although the name is extremely popular in Russia). The name is derived from the word anástasis (ἀνάστασις) and it means resurrection. When I was a kid, we went on a tour of a floating hospital boat called the Anastasis. The boat travelled the world providing medical care in countries that had very little access to modern medicine. I remember feeling so proud that I shared a name with such an important vessel.
Particularly over the last few years, I completely resonate with the meaning of my name — resurrection. I feel like I’ve experienced an absolute crumbling and decay of a self-created facade that I had unknowingly constructed. So many of my ideas about life have come toppling down — and in the midst of the darkest nights, I was able to see a tiny spark, reminding me of the love that was available to me. That love has come from within me, and it has been reflected in a flourishing of my relationship with my husband and a growing love for the simple moments of life that bring so much joy into my day. I’ve never needed less in my life to be happy. I don’t feel like I need to escape things.
When Aaron and I decided to get married, I made the decision to take his last name because I didn’t want to keep my previously married name… and I didn’t feel like I wanted to go back to my maiden name. It’s weird, but changing my last name to ‘Allison’ felt really good. It felt so unlike my first, traumatic name change process.
By the way, my family still calls me Stacy… old habits die hard. My sister Mare calls me, ‘Steak’ (as a shortened version of Stacy… not because of an affinity for actual steak). The only name I’ve never been called is Anna, which is the most obvious 'nickname’ for Anastasia. Every once in awhile, somebody who doesn’t know me will decide to shorten ‘Anastasia’ to ‘Anna’… and I usually end up giving them an unintentional blank stare while I try to figure out who they are talking about - ha!
I love my full name now, even if it does mean that I accidentally get called Allison all the time - ha! I know that names are, in the most simple sense, an arbitrarily assigned jumble of letters and sounds that are meant to designate the identity of a particular human being. And while I also understand that a name can’t possibly capture the true essence of what is far beyond those letters and sounds… I really feel like my name finally fits me.
Dear AMA,
How would you react to winning a lottery? (Feel free to invent your own kind of lottery)
I’ve actually thought about this many times, because I sometimes win the lottery every single morning… I know, I must be lucky, right?
I guess I should explain that…
When my husband left his job, we started doing a little practice that we called an Abundance Walk. Each day on our walk together, we’d speak out loud our gratitude for life itself and for each other… and we’d do our best to tap into a feeling of abundance, exactly where we were. We started doing this habit for a few reasons:
I didn’t want to sink into a fear/worry cycle when Aaron left his job and ‘dependable’ salary
I wanted to tap into the frequency of abundance, because I know that it opens me up to the infinite possibilities of life
If I live my life from a state of feeling abundant, it keeps me from acting from a place of fear or lack
The last part of our Abundance Walk was to speak, out loud, in the present tense, the ideal life visualization. In order to facilitate this, Aaron and I invented new and fantastical scenarios every single day whereby we would have access to the infinite (hint: we actually really do!). Here are a few of my favorite scenarios that we invented:
I’m walking down the street and I see something sparkling under a leaf. I pick up the leaf … and… lo and behold, it’s a 125 carat diamond!
Kim Kardashian ends up joining The Dance Experiment and it changes her life so much that she mentions it on her social media page, and 30,000 members join overnight — I have to purchase a studio for filming it every single morning since Zoom can’t sustain 30,000 people on a video call.
Oprah starts hiking (true story) and one of her friends gives her a Kula Cloth — she loves it so much that she adds it to her Oprah’s Favorite things list.
Kula Cloth ends up being used as a prop in a movie… and somehow it goes viral and people all over the world know what a Kula Cloth is. We sell out of every Kula we have, almost instantly, and have to upgrade our small warehouse to a big warehouse.
I got really motion sick a few years ago, which prompted me to start drinking Cherry Coke Zero (true story), after a decade hiatus from soda. My husband and I go on a motorcycle ride and I’m craving a Cherry Coke Zero, so we stop at a gas station and he buys a lottery ticket while we are there… we end up winning a $300 million dollars because of my Cherry Coke Zero addiction.
These are a few of the fun little scenarios that my husband and I invented on our walks — they are silly, but to say that they aren’t possible would be a lie. Anything is possible… and the idea with this exercise was to remind both of us that anything can happen, and that we need to open our minds to the infinite possibilities of life.
So, when one of these scenarios actually occurs… what will I do? Honestly, my husband and I have talked about this, and I probably wouldn’t change much with my life. We will never move from our current house (we love it too much!), and I’d probably still work for Kula (since I love that so much too). A dream of mine is to build a really amazing office/warehouse for Kula that can serve as a hiking hub for the local community near the Mountain Loop Highway — I think this could be a really important and valuable addition to the community, and I’d love for it to become a place where people could borrow/rent gear if they didn’t own it… and I’d love to be able to use the building to teach folks how to get outside safely and successfully.
My husband and I started riding motorcycles together last year, and I know that he really wants to get a touring motorcycle at some point so that we can do longer motorcycle trips together. So, if I were to buy anything with my lottery winnings, I think it would probably be some touring motorcycles so that we could travel together. Other than that, I’d want to increase the salaries for the folks that work for Kula, build the Kula dream office, pay off my house, and maybe buy a stand mixer for cookie making.
Mostly, these abundance exercises have taught me that it isn’t about wanting anything — it’s about finding the feeling of abundance that you can always generate within your own heart. It doesn’t cost me anything at all to think about going on a long motorcycle road trip with Aaron - and even thinking about it gives me the feeling of abundance. When I sit in my house and write these words, I am surrounded by and filled with a feeling of deep abundance and joy, that doesn’t have anything to do with money at all. Money, as I’ve learned, is a side effect of experiencing a deep feeling of abundance within your heart and body. It isn’t always easy to find this feeling… especially if it is hidden by feelings of lack or fear… but it is there. About a decade ago, I would have laughed in your face if you had said the word ‘abundance’ to me. I had a terrible relationship with money that was based entirely on fear, lack, doubt, anxiety and worry. I had frequent panic attacks thinking about it, and could never have fathomed a sense of universal connectedness with infinite anything. In fact, I would probably have scoffed at anybody who mentioned that… which is also OK, because I honestly was not ready to hear it.
About a year ago, I realized that every single day I did win the lottery — the infinity lottery. I told Aaron that I had won the infinity lottery on every single walk, and I meant it. I get to wake up every single day into a world of absolutely infinite possibilities in every direction. I can stretch my mind and my imagination to dream of anything… and I know that I can watch those dreams come true. My personal mantra is, ‘Abundance flows to me easily and effortlessly in surprising ways and I am open to receiving it.’ This doesn’t mean that I’m going to go out tomorrow and buy a Lamborghini … but it does mean that I’m open to anything and everything that is flowing my way. It also means that I will give generously, without expectations. It means that instead of fear, I will choose to see love. There is truly no greater wealth than a full heart. When you live your life from a place of already having received… things have a funny way of showing up.
Dear AMA:
You recently wrote, “After a particularly brutal climb that put me out of commission for a few weeks, I decided that I needed to temporarily take a hiatus from hiking and climbing so that I could focus on going to therapy and finding a sense of peace without needing to destroy myself in the wilderness.” Can you say more about this? I have been in talking therapy during a long-term injury (which prevents exercise) but I am still feeling miserable.
Friend, first off, I am so sorry to hear that you are currently experiencing a long-term injury that is preventing exercise. That’s really rough, and it is completely normal and understandable that you are feeling miserable about it. When exercise and hiking and other active pursuits are a really important part of your life… having them taken away feels like one of those magic tricks where the tablecloth gets pulled out from underneath the place settings… except that the magician had a little bit too much to drink and the glassware goes everywhere and breaks. Now, you’re feeling a bit stunned, confused… disoriented… and wondering why there are broken plates everywhere … and how a fork got stuck in your shoe. It sucks.
The hiatus that you are referring to was an intentional hiatus, because I realized that I was completely addicted to hiking and climbing (i.e. it had become my total identity). I will talk about that in a moment… but I also want to tell you about two injuries that I’ve had that prevented me from hiking and climbing for extended periods of time as well. In 2004-ish, I dislocated my left shoulder while putting on a shower robe. I wish I had a cooler story about dislocating my shoulder the first time, but that is the honest truth. One moment I was naked and slipping on a fuzzy robe… the next minute, I was lying on the ground in agonizing pain… before my shoulder magically ‘re-located’ itself into the socket. I was confused, horrified and in agony — what in the HECK had happened?
I went to the doctor, and learned that I had dislocated my shoulder. The orthopedic surgeon recommended that I start performing physical therapy, which I did in earnest, by my shoulder never improved. In fact, it continued to dislocate… 7 more times. These injuries happened while sleeping, tubing behind a boat, riding a dirt bike, starting a chainsaw, being ‘mock punched’ in my shoulder by an 80 year old man, and … the final straw… while glissading down the ‘chute’ on the South Side of Mt. Adams. This final dislocation was, by far, the worst. My shoulder popped out of its socket while I was sliding down the mountain and it is only by the grace of the alpine gods that I was able to stop myself before I careened off the slope. It took me at least 30 minutes to reduce my shoulder back into its socket. Note to self: slamming your arm against the snow like Mel Gibson does with a door jam in Lethal Weapon does not work. As it turns out, gently dangling my shoulder and giving it a slight tug did the trick. Phew! It was pretty awful, and I spent the entire hike out bawling.
After my Mt. Adams dislocation, it was very clear to me that PT was not helping… and that surgery was my only option. Reluctantly, I visited the surgeon, who scheduled me for a Bankart Repair on my left shoulder. A Bankart Repair involves tidying up the labrum ligament and then drilling it back into place using anchors so that the head of the humerus bone can no longer dislocate at will. The surgery was performed arthroscopically, and took about 2 hours. Shoulder surgeries have a notoriously long and tedious recovery process, and I was pretty nervous about the pain that might be involved, but I was most concerned about the amount of time that I would have to be away from hiking and climbing. I would have to wear a sling for 6 weeks… and my shoulder wasn’t expected to be healed for at least a year.
During this time, I tried to put my attention on the things that I could do… not the things that I couldn’t do… which is easier said than done. I told myself, “There is a reason this is happening, and I’m going to figure out what it is!”. I started to see myself as a detective… trying to notice all of the important things about the new places I was going… new people that I was meeting… and new things I was open to trying during my hiatus from my ‘normal’ activities. It was during this time that my new physical therapist told me about one of his friends, a woman, who loved to hike and climb, “You two would get along great!”, he told me. During this same period of time, my ‘normal’ climbing and hiking partner had started dating somebody new, and so we had been spending less and less time together, understandably, as he pursued a new romantic interest. I had been feeling a bit forlorn about the loss of my climbing partner, and even though I couldn’t do anything yet, I told my PT that I’d love to get the information to contact his friend.
It took me almost a year before I was able to do any serious mountaineering again… although I was able to start hiking within about 5-6 months. Over the next few years, my new friend Brenda and I would go on to climb more mountains than I can possibly count together. She became one of my closest friends and my dearest hiking and climbing partners. I know that I never would have met her if I hadn’t had that shoulder surgery.
In 2012, I dislocated my right shoulder while climbing in Argentina. I was descending a peak called Cerro Solo, and I was mantling on a rocky ledge when suddenly - OUCH - my right shoulder dislocated and I cried out in agony. I was devastated… I knew that I had just pulled the ripcord on yet another surgery. After allowing myself to feel thoroughly awful and disappointed, I returned from my trip to Argentina and made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. I walked into the appointment and said, “I don’t want to do any PT… I just want it fixed.” The surgeon, after laughing for a little bit, said, “Ok - I won’t try to convince you otherwise.” My right Bankart Repair commenced in 2013, and I took 4-5 months off work, since I couldn’t be a police officer in a sling. During this time, I was pretty limited in my ability to exercise. I started a daily walking habit, but I had to remain somewhat sedentary, because it was uncomfortable to move my shoulder a lot. With all of my extra free time, guess what I decided to start doing again? I started writing. The blog that I started during my second surgery, although I was not aware of it at the time, was the itsy bitsy beginning of the seeds that would ultimately bloom into Kula Cloth. I am absolutely positive that Kula would not exist today if I hadn’t had that second surgery.
Now, about that intentional hiatus. I’ve mentioned my first marriage many times — this was a marriage that I walked into rather unconsciously. My ex and I were dating at the age of 26… and for some reason I thought that meant we were supposed to get married. I got swept away with the idea of marriage and wedding planning and meanwhile, I had given no actual thought to what it meant to get married. My ex and I had very little in common, other than the fact that we both worked in law enforcement. During the time we were together, he liked watching TV and I liked hiking. On his days off, he spent most of his time inside, surfing channels. I spent my time off pursuing my individual climbing pursuits. When we were first married, this seemed ideal for me and I always told everybody that he was ‘supportive’ of my hobbies… but really, we were living completely separate lives that didn’t foster any sense of connection or intimacy. He even insisted that we eat dinner while watching TV. I remember once during our relationship practically begging him to eat dinner at the table so that we could talk and connect… and I can recall one instance of this ever happening. The best day of our entire marriage was a day when the power went out in our neighborhood. For one, glorious day, there was no electricity… and no TV. Ironically, once I decided to leave our marriage, he actually broke up with his television habit… but the escapism in the mountains on my part and the TV addiction on his part had created too much of a fissure, and neither of us was emotionally capable of repairing it.
After we split up, I moved into a studio apartment in Tacoma, Washington where I lived by myself in a 600 sq ft space that was akin to a hotel room with a kitchen. I actually really loved it — I had no TV. I also was experiencing a lot of shame about the divorce and I realized that my insatiable need to escape into the mountains was just as much a part of our failed marriage as his addiction to TV. It’s very easy to blame somebody else for a failed marriage, but it’s even harder to look at the ways in which my own habits contributed to the dissolution. I realized that I was using hiking and climbing in an unhealthy way to escape dealing with everything. How could I tell? I’d be on the summit of one mountain… already feeling anxiety about coming home and needing to know what my next climb would be. I looked at the calendar and I’d have a panic attack about wondering if I could ‘fit in’ enough hiking that week. When I met Aaron, and he told me that he liked to watch the Seahawks football games, I almost decided not to date him because I didn’t think that I would be able to give up hiking on Sundays. If I had any free moment of time, I needed to numb myself through hiking. I realized that I didn’t even know who I was, beyond the trail. This was a shocking realization for me, so I decided that I needed to quit.
I stopped hiking for about 6 months, and it was really difficult for me at first. I had thrived on having more and more epic adventures… and it was becoming increasingly important for me to make my hikes more challenging, more treacherous, and consist of more and more mileage. During a one day ascent of Snowking Mountain in the North Cascades, I actually felt so sick that I vomited mid-climb… and kept going. Eighteen miles and 12 hours later, we were back at the car and even though I felt awful… at least I hadn’t thought about my life all day. In January of one year, my friend Brenda and I did a winter ascent of Observation Rock, which is a remote peak near Spray Park in Mt. Rainier. This climb involved hiking through a blizzard and hunkering down in a tent for nearly 16 hours to wait out the weather… until we managed to ascend the peak (which was terrifying) and hike back to the car. It took me almost a month to feel like I had energy again. I was ultimately diagnosed with a thyroid condition during this time in my life — and I’m sure that my adrenal glands weren’t up to snuff either. I ended up being placed on thyroid medication, just so that I had the energy to get through the day.
As Aaron and I started dating, we started doing very low key exercises like walking around Tacoma and gentle workouts. On a lot of days, I didn’t do any of these at all, and it was challenging because I’ve always seen myself as a very fit, healthy person. Gradually, as I began the process of connecting with myself on a deeper level, I started to understand that there was more to me than being a hiker or a climber… there was a consciousness that existed beyond those things, but that included them too — like images on a blank canvass. I could be a hiker and a climber, but I was also something more than that. I started meditation during this time, and developed a regular practice of tapping into the stillness that lived within my heart — this was stillness that I once thought only existed on the summit of a mountain or when I was so out of breath that I could barely see straight. I had pushed myself so hard to find this sense of blankness in my life… that I had been unable to see that I had it within me the whole time. I used to tell people that hiking felt like a, ‘forced meditation’, but the truth was that I had no idea what meditation actually was. You don’t need to force meditation. You don’t need to ascend a peak to find stillness… you can find it anywhere… in busy traffic… on the most stressful days… in the midst of chaos… the stillness is there.
Once I began to embody this new understanding of peace and stillness, I started to venture back out into the wild again — but it was no longer from a place of needing it. I love hiking and climbing, but I’m also OK without them. I don’t need them in order to ‘survive’ this next week at work.. and I’m not trying to escape from anything anymore, because the idea that I need to escape something is really only manufactured in my mind. Are there things that maybe we want to change in our lives? Of course there are! But is escape the answer? Probably not. It’s hard to face difficult moments — but when we have the courage to do so, we open ourselves up to the goodness that can bloom from those moments.
As I look back on my forced moments of ‘time off’ from hiking and climbing, I can see now that they bloomed into some of the most beautiful and special things in my life — unexpected friendships and a company that feels like an extension of my heart. None of what I have written in this answer is meant to invalidate difficult moments in your life, or to say that you shouldn’t be having a tough time right now — those feelings are 100% valid and they are important to be with and to acknowledge and to experience. But, they can also be transmuted into peace. The challenging moments in our life are here as teachers and healers to show us the way to creating more of the things that we want. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that while I might have smacked somebody in the face for telling me to look for the silver lining in the moment… once I was able to process my own emotions, I have absolutely experienced the brilliance of the silver lining in every single one of my darkest days. Get curious about where you are right now… and be open to asking WHY? Become a detective of your life and start noticing the things that you are seeing around you… your open energy will invite in new ideas and opportunities that never would have existed. You can shift and change your story by going with it, instead of trying to push against it.
Letting go and trusting life is hard sometimes, especially when it doesn’t look like what you think it should look like… but I hope, friend, that you can trust that it can and will bloom into something far more beautiful than any one of us could possibly imagine. I am sending you so much love friend — and wishing you a feeling of ease, peace and energy on your healing journey. May it blossom in unexpected ways and may you discover the gold that is hidden in the chaos — a reflection of your inner goodness.
Friends, thank you so much for being here - and thank you so much for filling the Kula Diaries Vault with your beautiful words and questions. If you have something you’d like me to consider including in my next AMA, please feel free to submit it, I would love to hear from you. I am wishing all of you peace, ease and joy in your day — please know that you are loved, exactly as you are.
Love,
Anastasia
This is what I needed to hear today
I love how you say to become a “detective of your own life!” What a cool idea to step back and treat these obstacles as something to be curious about instead of just being miserable! I’m going to give it a try. And I’m definitely going to start using the phrase “solvitur ambulando” in my daily conversations ☺️👏🏻. Thank you for all you share and teach here, Anastasia!!